Vision and Goals

I believe God sees this course as a fellowship. We are a team
brought together for a season of growth through mutual training, challenge,
equipping, and discipline. All these serve the ends that every participant
attain new and lasting appreciation for the theological beliefs of the
Church of Jesus Christ, and every participating follower of Jesus gain
new and lasting skill in the Church's practices of theological reflection.

More specifically, the course intends its participants:

To weigh the visions of various Christian communities of the identity,
character, and work of the God of Jesus Christ in the world's creation
and redemption.

To gain an understanding of the historical teachings and practices
of Christian traditions.

To grasp the centrality of Jesus Christ and his gospel to the Christian
tradition.

To connect Christian theology with Christian practice, centering
both on the life of the worshipping Church.

A group of my colleagues from other disciplines formulated the following
list of aspirations for this course: "We want our students to be
able to reason about their faith, and then be able to apply their reasoned
faith to all other disciplines and to all areas of their lives. We want
students to recognize ways in which this reasoned faith is both biblically
based and historically located. We want to acquaint students with both
the basic grammar of theology and the complexities of its syntax in competing
theological traditions. We want students to know that theology is both
a useful and a limited tool. (For example, each model of the atonement
seems to contribute something to our understanding of the crucifixion,
but no one model of the atonement seems completely to account for the
mystery of the crucifixion.) We want to deconstruct less thoughtful theologies
that students may bring with them, but only to help them reconstruct more
thoughtful and durable theologies." To this I say, Amen.

You are about to discover the Christian tradition to a depth you cannot
now appreciate  and maybe discover yourself as well, for you are
about to encounter the deepest mysteries of our faith. Some of these have
taken centuries to unfold to the Church's satisfaction; others remain
unsolved to this day, waiting for some faithful community of disciples
(including you?) to describe the faith in new and clarifying ways. You
are about to spend a decent chunk of your brief life training in the practices
of intellectual discipleship through which the Church has proclaimed the
good news of Jesus Christ, bringer of the Holy Spirit and witness to the
infinite love of God the Father.

You and I are also about to do a whole lot of work, because while the
power to do these things is God-given, they don't come easily.